@everyone: Tweet the class! #cl472

We will be using twitter to continue the conversation about computational linguistics outside of class.

Goals

• Create a sense of community within the class
• Provide on-going feedback to peers and instructors about what is interesting/difficult/etc in the material
• Understand the language of tweets
• Create a (labeled) corpus for studying from the perspective of NLP
• Digital literacy: Managing information overload

Requirements

1. Create and set up twitter account (at twitter.com), due 3/30/12.
   • You are encouraged to create a special twitter account for this class, rather than use one you already have or might use in the future. The instructor is @ebender472 and the TA is @zpozen.
   • Note that twitter only allows one account per email address. You may need to create another email address (e.g., with gmail or hotmail) to create a second twitter account.
   • Leaving tweets public is easier (and likely better for our corpus construction). However, if you want to keep tweets private (i.e., only to other class members), you can do so via the following steps:
     • Click on "Home"
     • Click on your name in the upper left
     • Click on "Edit your profile" (upper right)
     • Click on "Account" in the menu to left
     • Check the box next to "Protect my tweets".
   • Using the discussion board, post your twitter handle
   • Add everyone else's twitter handles to your "following" list
   • If you are keeping your tweets private, approve requests from all classmates. (Pending requests can be found on your profile under "Requests" in the menu on the left.)
2. Develop a set of hashtags (to be done in class, as a group)

   We will mark all tweets from this class with the hashtag #cl472. In addition, we will develop a classification of tweet types we want to use (and associated hashtags) in the first week of class. This will allow us to use the corpus as labeled training data for a classification task.

   In class on 3/28, we decided on a set of labels that reflect both dialogue act (question/response/statement/exclamation) and emotion: #curious, #help, #fyi, #wtf, #hth, #argh, #yay, #lol. To the extent possible, all tweets should be labeled with one of these. If none of them fit, the tweet belongs to the "other" category. (We'll assume all unlabeled tweets are "other".)

3. Tweet at least three times per week, using the hashtags we develop. At least one tweet/week should be a reply to a classmate's tweet. Activity on twitter will count for 2% of your course grade. If you are following the tweets of other NLP researchers and want to address tweets to them or retweet their tweets with the #cl472 hashtag, that is welcome.
4. Follow classmates' tweets

Note that twitter is not intended to replace the class dicussion board. The discussion board will still be used to discuss assignments and well as course content. We do expect to see cross-references (links) between twitter and the discussion board!

Towards the end of the quarter, we'll reflect on to what extent this exercise was useful, and how.